The sparkle in the eyes I got from the NDIS person signing me up (which seemed to involve going over the same shit in my application) when I said I wrote was so annoying in retrospect. She asked if I was willing to do anything freelanced based, including proofreading, I said I wasn't qualified and I can't build a client base that quickly. I need a wage. Even if they were willing to put me through a business course, it won't necessarily translate to me running a real business.
But I'm so sick of people thinking I can make a decent living off this talent. I'm telling you, I can't. I had to fight for something that would've still given me more money than I'd ever have earned as a professional writer, which is about 12 grand a year. And that's for established writers in my country. We don't make money from slaving away on a laptop. It's all the other shit, I keep saying this, pay attention.
Please for the love of God also pay attention to the current writers strike in the US before badgering me over screen writing. It's become an exploitable talent. Nobody wants to pay you what you are genuinely worth never mind what you think you're worth. The studios don't even care anymore, they want to replace writers with AI, and actors too now. Anyone who wants to work in that sphere can be exploited because they know it's a "dream job" and certain people will accept less to do it. I could work in a salt mine set up churning out shit other people make more money off. It's not that easy to just do this. I do this as a hobby, soon as I have to profit from it, I fail. I would need so much support and an agent and an editor to do what I do well. I wasn't making passive income from my books you can't just release a KDP book and sit back and wait for the money to roll in. It's bullshit. I even said on my writer's Instagram feed I didn't quit my work-a-day to do this professionally. I'm not being defeatist about this, I'm being realistic and I am genuinely sick of people's starry eyed misconceptions that one successful author means anyone can break it that big. It's NOT FROM THEIR BOOKS. They sold the rights to it and it's residuals and even that is dependent on your IP being capable of some level of mass marketing. I would get shitty royalties on a traditional contract. Amazon may offer more but they can't get your book into stores. Stop pretending authors are living it large because one TERF has a boat now.
The orcas have their work cut out as it is, don't make me send them after you too.
In addition to this, I just heard a quote that turned on all my bells. Game developers tried to tell Amazon management stopping games being sold on Steam was like refusing to sell a book on Amazon. That was EXACTLY what my publisher refused to do, to the extent she sabotaged the applicable .mobi files by not bothering to format them well enough and then later, when she was being "forced" to use Amazon because of the CreateSpace take over, she refused to do this and desperately looked for a POD alternative. I think the one she did find was cumbersome and it put a long delay on us getting new editions published. She was even insulted and angry whenever we asked her to upload the Amazon version because people didn't want to buy from another site, they either wanted the paperback on their Amazon or they wanted it on their device directly. People aren't like me who now how to manually upload files to a device. The ease of purchase for Kindle was one of the reasons it's done so well.
Meanwhile, ANYONE will ask you if you say you've written a book "Is it on Amazon?" (and to a lesser extent Audible) You HAVE to say yes. When I took back my material, I got weird congratulations from someone for them being released. She did release them since CreateSpace published there directly, but she didn't want to be locked into the contract. And when she released my second book, she botched the formatting and refused to pull it to fix it. I didn't care if it was unavailable for a couple of days, I knew she could fix it and I'd say it was more a case of laziness than worrying about profits. While I understood her not wanting to be locked to Amazon, she destroyed her own business and I had to cancel my contracts because she was failing to produce a product. Last I could tell, she either did it on behalf of people before closing the company, or gave them the files and told them to do it themselves. I also saw she was incorrectly claiming someone's book after they left. I still have to put up with my old Amazon listings existing online because Amazon don't remove print books from the website, they only make them unavailable, since third parties might still be selling that edition with the same ISBN etc.
Having said all this, the only reason I refused to publish my children's book to Amazon via Blurb was I didn't want them making claim to any material the illustrators made. Given they didn't seem entirely bothered, I could change this but nobody's shown interest in it anyway, so it never mattered. And given there's an existing scam now with AI picture being shoveled onto the site for passive revenue, it would make sense not to go there. I don't know. When it comes to paperback books, it really is limiting yourself refusing to bow to Zon.
Coupled with this, if someone was refusing to buy my book because there's no audiobook version, I don't care. I don't care enough at all to accommodate those people at my own time and expense. I don't even want to hear another person reading my books. If it was part of a contract, provided I didn't have to do it myself, I'd live with it. I was trying to avoid doing it for my publisher, again because she was insisting we do this in the most unprofessional and time consuming way. We could deliver it in chapters which I think she was planning to use some as samples. I refused. The best she got from me was a short audio about me that I did purely to shut her up. I wasn't prepared to buy a new microphone and sit in my room doing this. It would've stressed me out too much to even try. I hated making stupid videos for Facebook, I resented I had to set up my own book signing and stage pictures (I didn't but I was considering just setting up a table outside a book store for a fake shot, and nobody got back to me about my request, I'm sure it was due to how unprofessional my book looked on publication. It was abysmal and she was expecting me to be able to buy in bulk from her to sell or have brick and mortars order from her. The only person who managed to get a Barnes and Noble signing was someone who knew the owner). I just saw their Facebook page has finally been removed, the twitter still lives with dead links to the site. People tend to have Audible subscriptions now since audiobooks are so cost prohibitive for so many people, I don't know anyone who buys these and if they were only available from some flaky outlet or Soundcloud, nobody would buy them. I knew it would've been a huge waste of my time to do this for both books or even one. She was too unreliable to get our actual books reprinted. I wanted her to go away and fix all my issues before I gave her anything else. Her obsession with SEOs by way of flooding the web with blog posts, I've not seen a single other person doing this but I guess it was a free way of doing it. She was so stupidly fixated on this and not making a quality product, it drove me insane she couldn't even see that, she was definitely overselling her ability to get the right attention, she seemed to be using web 2.0 logic, the way people seem to think you can rely on ten year old tactics for current day internet problems. But having a substandard audiobook and probably charging more than it would've cost any individual to record anyway (we were recommended free software, as far as I knew, none of us had professional recording equipment), it had no more chance of working that her dumb as fuck podcast idea, which I'm still ranting about to this day.
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